Rich Rubin

speaker

13 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 11 Feb

Rich Rubin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ What’s News · Surprisingly Strong Jobs Report Hints at an Improving Labor Market · 11 Feb 2026 podcast

There is really just this growth in three big things, in Social Security, Medicare, and interest.

This big interest cost that covers all the debt that we've racked up in the past.

And so those things are just growing faster than everything else.

We're running deficits fast.

5.8% of GDP heading towards 6.7% of GDP.

We've done that before, but those are deficit levels that we haven't hit outside of emergencies and wars and recessions.

We're not in the middle of some emergency.

We had all these tax cuts that were scheduled to expire at the end of last year, the end of 2025.

And so for a long time, CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has looked at that and said, oh, we're going to get all this revenue.

And Congress and President Trump extended basically all of those tax cuts permanently and created some new tax cuts.

That tax law, which also had some spending cuts, increases deficits by about $4.7 trillion compared to had they just let the tax cuts expire.

The risk is that you run into a sort of crisis where interest rates go up or the federal debt is crowding out private investment or the debt is so burdensome that bond investors demand we pay more in interest rates to service that debt.

You just run increasing risks the larger and larger that these debt and deficit numbers go.

Showing 1–13 of 13